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TOKYO — Japanese leaders reacted angrily yesterday after the police on Okinawa said a U.S. Air
Force serviceman was suspected of breaking into an apartment while drunk and punching a schoolboy,
just weeks after two U.S. sailors were accused of raping a woman on the same island.

The trespassing and assault took place yesterday morning, police said. The airman apparently was
in violation of a curfew imposed just last month by the U.S. military on all of its roughly 50,000
military personnel in Japan after the rape accusation.Authorities did not release the name of the
24-year-old airman, who was hospitalized after falling to the ground from a third-story window.

The episodes have stirred outrage on Okinawa, the southern Japanese island that hosts
three-quarters of the U.S. bases in Japan. The episodes also threaten to complicate ties between
the United States and its closest Asian ally at a time when both nations are trying to work
together to face a growing challenge from China.The episodes have added to Okinawa’s increasingly
vocal opposition to what many islanders see as an oversized U.S. base.

The governor of Okinawa, Hirokazu Nakaima, warned that the actions by U.S. servicemen threatened
the entire U.S.-Japan alliance.

“You can only conclude that they are fracturing the alliance,” Nakaima was quoted as saying by
the daily Asahi Shimbun.

U.S. officials said they would cooperate with the investigation.

The police said the U.S. airman was suspected of entering the apartment at 1 a.m. yesterday as
two schoolboys inside were sleeping. The American woke them up and punched one of them, age 13, in
the face, the police said, before kicking in a television set and then trying to flee through the
third-story window.

The police said the door of the apartment, rented by a 41-year-old woman, was unlocked, as is
still common in parts of low-crime Japan.